I am delighted to offer readers of Writing It Real this personal essay by writer, editor, and publicist Bob Yehling. In his essay, we get a glimpse of a passionate writer at work, writing from life experience, appreciating the work of others who do so, and looking for places to publish his essays on line.  It’s always good to hear how writers who build essays around their personal experience find homes for their work.  Based on his time behind the editor’s desk, his time in the field and writing about it and his love of the Internet, Bob shares more than a tested approach to publishing;  he shares his passion for ongoing involvement in the life of writing and the community of people who learn from others’ experience.

Personal Flights Into Cyberspace
by Bob Yehling

During the early 1990s, I met the Himalayas. I spent three weeks trekking in the central highlands of Nepal, rolling up, down and through terraced hillsides, rugged ridges, river valleys, and villages of stone and mud thatch houses. Our group of 25, including leaders and porters, walked ukola – uphill – through forests of rhododendron and bamboo. We climbed beyond the terraces of millet, rice and buckwheat, ascended beyond the tree line, crossed fields of quartz, snow and ice, and further crunched exposed seashells left behind 50 million years ago when the Himalayas shed their embryonic status as seamounts. We walked up and down two major massif passes – Ganesh Himal and Baudha Himal. We weren’t Jean-Luc Lafaille trying to ascend all 14 Himalayan peaks above 25,000 feet without bottled oxygen, but our feat was arduous enough. We crested at 16,000 feet in an encampment of caves, yak dung and splendid views of the jagged Tibetan peaks and multi-spectral sunsets that went to bed in Kashmir, then raised the curtain on Arcturus, Ursa Major, Scorpius and a show with golf ball-sized stars.

On this trip, I wrote a 130-page travel journal, intent on sharing the grueling beauty of this country and its seven climate zones. The window of creativity opened and I wrote 30 haiku, many of which have been published. Yet, my real goal was to share the landscape and the experience of walking180-plus miles. I also wanted to put a mystical spin on it by describing the inner feelings and perceptions of sitting in the lap of the yogis.

While decompressing a couple of weeks later on Thailand’s Don Phi Phi islands, the real root chord of this trip hit me—the children. They greeted us as we entered their villages and followed us for three or four miles on our way out. They stopped us, smiled their beatific smiles, offered us gifts, accepted our offerings. Their dark eyes were portals of divinity, radiant with inner light that beamed from their pupils. On paper, they were among the world’s poorest beings. In person, they exuded a  richness of joy and spirit that invoked both bliss and envy in me.

I wrote a deeply personal essay. It came out in the form of a letter to these children, the second paragraph of which said:

As exhilarating as the Himalaya are, I cannot say they were the high point of the trek. The high point was a special experience that was repeated every time I came in contact with you, the Children of Nepal.

One of the middle paragraphs noted:

I watched you carrying your bhais and bahinis (younger brothers and sisters) on your backs and hips while you jumped rope or played hopskotch, or worked in the fields that have provided food for your families since time immemorial. You didn’t mind our watching you, as you played outside your homes, as you recited from your schoolbooks, and you sang joyous songs and tried to teach us the words.

And, the final paragraph:

I came to Nepal to see the Himalaya with my eyes. I left Nepal knowing what it means to truly See. Your eyes and faces taught me this. I know I can only repay you by passing it on. Farewell for now, Children of Nepal, until we meet again, along the journey of Heart.

So much for my original plan to sell travel articles. This essay, entitled “An Open Letter to the Children of Nepal,” made it onto six travel websites, the Above the Clouds trekking magazine/brochure, and continues to migrate to children’s education and development conferences some 10 years after I wrote it. An editor for Highlights for Children read it and asked for a more specific piece for both the magazine and website, again featuring the children. I wrote “The Ocean Comes to Nepal,” an essay about the Pacific conch shell I brought on the trek. The kids held their ears to it and listened to a sound most of them will never hear in person—sumundra, the ocean–although according to ancient Tibetan legend, their ancestral home, Mt. Meru, rose from the ocean with the first human beings, who later spread around the world.

The reason why “An Open Letter to the Children of Nepal” found its audience is precisely what makes personal essays work on the Internet—writing about something different and tightly angled that resonates at a deep, emotional, heart-felt level. When a reader goes online and seeks personal essays, you can rest assured of two things: 1) This is not the normal Internet surfer; she or he is looking for substance; and 2) This person wants to be moved, as well as entertained and enlightened. Another article about blistered feet and eating dhal baat may have sold, but not to the audience I wanted to hit.

A good double-strategy when selling personal essays online is to think like a reader and write like a narrative non-fiction or literary memoir writer. Find the most unique angle of your experience. Perhaps you are cooking Cajun chicken for the first time. As the aroma of the spices and sauce titillate your nostrils, you recall a scary moment from a childhood vacation when you got lost at night among the more gothic neighborhoods and creepy vine-covered oaks of New Orleans. There’s your essay. Write about it, deeply. Do not let discomfort, sadness, wistfulness or any chair-squirming feelings stop you. Go deeper. Connect with those universal feelings that stir all of our cells and hearts, and write it.

One of the best examples of this is my friend Barbara Stahura’s essay, “Fallow Time.” She wrote this several years ago, when a number of circumstances converged to create a deep sadness in her life. Rather than avoid the circumstances of her disappointment over broken promises, she dove into them through her journal. She lived in Indiana, whose large cities are surrounded by farms that often lie fallow while others produce corn and soybeans. As I read it, I imagined the strength it took to sit there and write. I felt inspired by the strength. In this essay, the words are guideposts that take you into the depths. If you dare. From the depths, Stahura finds redeeming qualities in lying fallow.  “Fallow Time” gives Internet readers a compelling vicarious experience.

To reach an Internet audience, be sure your essay has passion. It should either burn, sadden, create joy, provoke deep thought, shed tears, invoke laughter or elicit anger. Vanilla ice cream never did much in the gelato stands in Italy; so it is with flat essays on the Internet. I am now shopping an essay I just wrote, “The Jewel in Ritalin’s Shadow.” It concerns the relationship between ADD, our innate creative process, my childhood and why I thank the high heavens that Ritalin was not available like candy in the 1960s—and why it should be banned except for extreme cases now.  I am very passionate about this subject, since I have a 19-year-old daughter and I sometimes teach writing workshops to gifted 9-14 year olds. I am infuriated that 8 million kids in this country – and 12 percent of all boys between the ages of 6-14 – are on a drug that has many of the same chemical properties as cocaine.  I believe Ritalin is altering the brain chemistry of creative, open-thinking children who can’t fit into the strict mold of a school system that is structured from Henry Ford’s Model T assembly lines of the 1920s—the model of our modern public school system.

Had I been a student today, I might be on Ritalin. Instead, my parents and grandmother worked hard to figure out why I didn’t fit the mold, and they helped me find my expressive channels—drawing, music, individual sports and writing. What happened to looking out for the future of our kids? We’re mortgaging their original thought and natural learning capabilities. We’re stunting our own growth as a society and civilization! As a workshop teacher, parent, certain ADD kid and creative human being who gives a damn about our future, I will not be silent on this one. This essay will hit like lava on ocean and find its audience. After all, ADD is the number two problem in education today. The standardized tests emanating from the marriage between corporate America and Washington D.C. are number one, but that’s another essay.

This is the commitment and passion that will sell your essays on the Internet.

Once your well-angled, deeply-felt and focused essay is complete, look for your Internet market. Be imaginative and creative in your search of categories of sites. For instance, “Fallow Heart” could be marketed to women’s sites, relationship sites, and even sites that pertain to life in the Midwest. An essay I wrote for one of the workshops I teach, “Playing With The Muse,” is making its rounds between writing sites, electronic magazines (e-zines), sites for creative arts teachers, and websites of literary publications. I am shopping “The Jewel in Ritalin’s Shadow” to the myriad ADD/ADHD sites, teaching sites, e-zines and assorted other categories. “An Open Letter to the Children of Nepal” found its audience thanks to the viral nature of the Internet. However, had I fanned out my marketing, I would have gone to travel websites and travel e-zines, tourism sites originating in Nepal, children’s development sites, and websites in Germany – which sends more tourists to Nepal than any other country, including the United States.

In these post dot-com boom years, your creativity and imagination is a great marketing tool. The days of the $2 per word e-zines are long gone; now, selling pieces requires you to think like a product maker who searches all roads and alleys for distribution channels. Let’s say you have an essay about the thoughts, feelings and ancient memories that poured through you one rainy night while you were eating a simple meal in the converted wine cellar of a 13^th century Italian castle—and the raindrops released the stories within the stones. Where to shop? Look at e-zines and travel e-zines. Then go to the websites of travel agencies, tourist bureaus, hoteliers and others who market Italy. A wine website might like this one. The websites of established print magazines on travel, food, in-flight and lifestyle would be good markets. If you write about visiting the ailing parent from whom you distanced yourself ten years ago because you feel compelled to visit and feelings percolate once you walk in the door, your essay might find a home on a newspapers’ websites because of its human interest. Look at the way your essay might fit into websites on parenting, senior citizen living, psychology, and personal relationships.

To access these markets, I always start with three tools: Angela Adair-Hoy’s weekly e-newsletter “Writer’s Weekly,” (http://www.writersweekly.com) which lists the newest print and electronic markets available and which offers free subscriptions; Writer’s Market Online; and. I search by category, write down all possible sites on a piece of paper and quickly research the sites. Next, I jot down email addresses and telephone numbers. If I’m going to pitch an e-zine or website that has an e-zine element to it, the acquisition editor’s name and e-mail address should be on the site. If not, or if I’m going to try to place my essay on a business or service organization website, I will call and ask for the name of the online marketing director. As a last resort, I ask for the regular marketing director. I also move laterally from existing print magazines. Print magazines have websites that run anywhere from 20 to 75 percent material that is not lifted from the magazine.

Once I collect all the information, I write my e-mails or paper letters, click or mail in, and wait for the response.  I always send 10 queries at a time.

The key to querying online is to sell the editor/marketing director on the universal appeal and the value your piece has to their site/company. For instance, my essay on ADD will not cut it with manufacturers of Ritalin, but an essay on the travails of raising a brilliant but hyperactive, trouble-prone child would work with parenting websites and websites on alternative education. Universalize it. When you think about your essay, think about all the readers who might be interested in reading it. When I was editing commemorative publications several years ago, I reviewed maybe 800 queries per year. I had two writers who illustrated both ends of the concept of “universalizing.” One was an excellent, versatile writer equally proficient at journalism and the personal touch. I loved her writing style, but the queries I received were always too fringy or provincial for the national and international audiences of our magazines. She didn’t have any idea about how to show that her writing would connect with readers at sensory, spiritual and intellectual levels.  The other person was an average writer whose pieces always needed editing, but whose queries sold me constantly because she knew how to make me see that readers everywhere would read her work. One could write; the other could universalize. In time, the better writer learned how to universalize her ideas so they would resonate as strongly with someone in London as they do with her next-door neighbor. Now, this person regularly receives national assignments from editors who sometimes call her—the dream of any freelance writer.

Give us a portal into your inner world. We want to climb the mountains and shed the tears with you. Let us resonate with your experience. Then use the same tenacity to source, uncover, research and connect with the e-zines, e-newsletters and websites that will carry your essay to their readers. Personal essays are a rich reading source on the Internet. Find your websites, and we online readers will gravitate to your voice.